James Eric Fuller, 63, was detained on misdemeanor disorderly conduct and threat charges Saturday during the event taped for a special edition of ABC’s “This Week,” Pima County sheriff’s spokesman Jason Ogan said.

He apparently became upset when Trent Humphries suggested that conversations about gun control be delayed until all the dead were buried, KGUN-TV in Tucson reported.

Authorities said he took a picture of the leader and yelled “you’re dead.”

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37 Responses to “Tucson Shooting Victim Held For Death Threat Against Tea Party Leader”

The guy went through hell just recently. I’m not sure he’s actually got it together yet. He watched people, some he probably knew, be injured and killed. He himself was shot in the knee. I’d imagine he spends a lot of time angry.

Getting shot and seeing several people die in front of you would likely make many people a little “off”. If anyone deserves a bit of a pass, I’d give it to the people that were there. Doesn’t excuse it, just makes it understandable.

Yeah, without knowing more, I’m inclined to give this guy a mulligan as long as he seems to understand that he lost it a bit. He could almost certainly benefit from some counseling, too bad that most males attach a stigma to it.

When people experience a frightening traumatic event like a shooting, they get a huge shot of adrenalin.The result is that the event gets seared in your memory in a very prominent way. You can have flashbacks triggered by very little stress, such as loud noise or anything else mildly startling.

There’s a lot of value in being made more aware of what you are going through both psychologically and physiologically, understanding that it’s normal, and processing it with a professional.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with doing the same thing with a trusted and understanding friend, if you’re fortunate enough to have the right kind of friend. But if you feel reluctant about relying on a friend, take advantage of a pro.

Yeah, without knowing more, I’m inclined to give this guy a mulligan as long as he seems to understand that he lost it a bit.

KK, here is Fuller last Friday, the day before his arrest:

James Eric Fuller, 63, who was shot in the knee, had told The Post on Friday, the day before his arrest, that top Republican figures should be tortured — and their ears severed.

“There would be torture and then an ear necklace, with [Minnesota US Rep.] Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin’s ears toward the end, because they’re small, female ears, and then Limbaugh, Hannity and the biggest ears of all, Cheney’s, in the center,” Fuller said.

I’d say this goes a man’s derangement goes a little further than temporary instability due to a WOUNDED KNEE.

Like I said, “without knowing more.” Now that I know more, I see that I’d like to know even more.

His remarks do suggest that he’s at least a kneejerk liberal. But folks who experience an event like he did are quite likely to get PTSD. Getting shot in the knee isn’t all of his experience. Presumedly he saw other people get shot and killed, and experienced sudden abject terror for several minutes. Depending on how well he had been informed about the particulars of Loughner, he might be still be operating from the mistaken assumption that the skinhead with the gun was a right winger. Which we know is incorrect.

This is not an excuse for his actions. Still, the fact that he was among those wounded in the shooting should be regarded as a mitigating circumstance. How mitigating? Indeterminate at this point.

I think the knee jerk liberal line is a major overstatement. Do you know a single liberal, knee jerk or otherwise that has said something like that? I also haven’t seen anything that would indicate we “know” much of anything about Laughner other than that he was a whack job. I’ve seen him described as a liberal, a conservative, apolitical and an atheist.

Do you know a single liberal, knee jerk or otherwise that has said something like that?

You asked for it:

“A spoiled child (Bush) is telling us our Social Security isn’t safe anymore, so he is going to fix it for us. Well, here’s your answer, you ungrateful whelp: [audio sound of 4 gunshots being fired.] Just try it, you little b*stard. [audio of gun being cocked].” — A “humor bit” from the Randi Rhodes Show

“I want to go up to the closest white person and say: ‘You can’t understand this, it’s a black thing’ and then slap him, just for my mental health” — New York city councilman Charles Barron

“..And then there’s Rumsfeld who said of Iraq ‘We have our good days and our bad days.’ We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say ‘This is one of our bad days’ and pull the trigger.” — From a fundraising ad put out by the St. Petersburg Democratic Club

“I believe in ecoterrorism.” — James Cameron

“…In an ideal world, American consumers could be convinced to do the right thing through an appeal to logic with public service messages like the ‘What Would Jesus Drive?’ TV campaign, but the kind of people who would buy a car that increases the risk to other motorists in an accident can’t be reasoned with. They’re selfish and stupid. It’s unfortunate that drivers must worry that their SUVs are being targeted by insulting stickers and Molotov cocktails, but one thing’s for sure: It couldn’t be happening to a more deserving group of people.” — Ted Rall winks at ecoterrorism

“Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.” — The Village Voice’s Michael Feingold, in a theater review of all places

(Rush Limbaugh)” just wants the country to fail. To me that’s treason. He’s not saying anything different than what Osama Bin Laden is saying. You might want to look into this, sir, because I think Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker but he was just so strung out on Oxycontin he missed his flight. … Rush Limbaugh, I hope the country fails, I hope his kidneys fail, how about that?” — Wanda Sykes

“You guys see Live and Let Die, the great Bond film with Yaphet Kotto as the bad guy, Mr. Big? In the end they jam a big CO2 pellet in his face and he blew up. I have to tell you, Rush Limbaugh is looking more and more like Mr. Big, and at some point somebody’s going to jam a CO2 pellet into his head and he’s going to explode like a giant blimp. That day may come. Not yet. But we’ll be there to watch. I think he’s Mr. Big, I think Yaphet Kotto. Are you watching, Rush?” — Chris Matthews

“I have zero doubt that if Dick Cheney was not in power, people wouldn’t be dying needlessly tomorrow….I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.” — Bill Maher

“If I got (Condi Rice) a— on camera, I would put my Mars Air Jordans so far up her butt that the Mayo Clinic would have to remove them.” — Spike Lee

“For those of you who do, as a matter of principle, oppose war in any form, the idea of supporting a conscientious objector who’s already been inducted [and] in his combat service in Iraq might have a certain appeal. But let me ask you this: Would you render the same support to someone who hadn’t conscientiously objected, but rather instead rolled a grenade under their line officer in order to neutralize the combat capacity of their unit?” — University Professor Ward Churhill on supporting soldiers who frag their officers

“Drudge? Aw, Drudge, somebody ought to wrap a strong Republican entrail around his neck and hoist him up about six feet in the air and watch him bounce.” — Liberal radio host, Mike Malloy

“I know how the ‘tea party’ people feel, the anger, venom and bile that many of them showed during the recent House vote on health-care reform. I know because I want to spit on them, take one of their ‘Obama Plan White Slavery’ signs and knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads.” — The Washington Post’s Courtland Milloy

I was the one who said he sounds like a kneejerk liberal. In saying this, I was not implying anything in particular against that set of people, only placing Fuller among them.

Fuller sounds like a liberal with a real personal beef who was willing to act on it. That is what it is. I don’t think it proves anything about any political group. Like I said before, I think Fuller’s experience as a target during the Loughner shooting is a legitimate mitigating circumstance.

I think the problem is that “his remarks” is KK’s description of what he said that makes him sound like a “kneejerk liberal.” Which remarks? Why not quote them? (At least once they’ve become the focus of the thread. Not knowing people would seize on that statement, I can understand KK’s generality at the outset.)

Then the Word questions what liberals, if any, have said “something like that.” Something like what? Have you guys mind-melded? I don’t know what remarks KK is talking about and I can’t tell that the Word does either, or even what the Word thinks KK might be referring to.

So Tillyosu responds with a bunch of examples, supposedly, of “something like that.” I have no idea if those examples are “something like that” because I don’t know what “that” is, other than, I guess, “his remarks.”

For all I know, the three of you are talking about three different things you each have in mind, since no one has really said what specifically he’s talking about.

James Eric Fuller, 63, who was shot in the knee, had told The Post on Friday, the day before his arrest, that top Republican figures should be tortured — and their ears severed.

“There would be torture and then an ear necklace, with [Minnesota US Rep.] Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin’s ears toward the end, because they’re small, female ears, and then Limbaugh, Hannity and the biggest ears of all, Cheney’s, in the center,” Fuller said.

That said, I don’t think KK meant he’s a “knee jerk liberal” because liberals typically make remarks like these. I think he meant “knee jerk liberal” in the sense that the target (no pun intended) of his remarks were convenient, recognizable conservatives. Correct me if I’m wrong here KK.

@theWord

1) I never said that you did. I just thought that given the preceding quotes, this was an opportune time to make a larger point.

2) Maybe it’s just me, but talking about raping a public figure, shooting them in the face, or blowing them up with a grenade, seems just as extreme as alluding to torture and ear necklaces. And if your differentiations are that minute, I think your standards are a little less than honest.

3) I’d be happy to if I had asserted, as you did, that these kinds of examples can’t be found on the right.

My sole point here is that I think Fuller can claim mitigating circumstances for his unwarranted actions.

I’m not sure I agree (really). Consider this, if you kick me in the shin, and then I turn around and punch theWord in the face, is your kicking me a mitigating circumstance for me punching theWord in the face? (Not minimizing his injury, just trying to make a simple analogy). After all, my understandable anger was directed at completely the wrong person. Perhaps he is a bit traumatized by the event, but then why lash out at a group of people who had nothing to do with the attack?

Oh that’s right, because the left has made every effort to associate this attack with that group. So basically the left exploits this tragedy to demonize a political opponent, and the result is an unstable person talking about torturing and cutting off the ears of that opponent.

Perhaps he is a bit traumatized by the event, but then why lash out at a group of people who had nothing to do with the attack?

Oh that’s right, because the left has made every effort to associate this attack with that group. So basically the left exploits this tragedy to demonize a political opponent, and the result is an unstable person talking about torturing and cutting off the ears of that opponent.

You’ve determined this causality how? Are you using the methods you attibute to “the left,” Tilly? ;)

Tilly I thought we were talking about Tucson and was not aware of any comments like making necklaces out of human ears. I wasn’t trying to start a food fight as KK was saying. That said, I condemned it you obviously have no problem since I found your list of quotes on a page advertising Ann Coulter. So one of doesn’t like the hate and the other just hates it on the other side. Your analogy was silly. Saying that there was no direct link to the shooting isn’t even close to saying that reckless, irresponsible comments are a good thing. FWIW, when the shooting first happened the first information I found was from a RightWing site (Christian at that) that already had a fake page up linking him to liberals but I have not heard a peep about that.

@KK: “When people experience a frightening traumatic event like a shooting, they get a huge shot of adrenalin.The result is that the event gets seared in your memory in a very prominent way. You can have flashbacks triggered by very little stress, such as loud noise or anything else mildly startling.”

This is something a lot of folks don’t know about and is an excellent layman’s encapsulation of how trauma stays with the victim, right down to use of the words ‘sear’ and ‘triggering’. Have you been through this yourself or with someone close to you, Kranky?

1. Fuller gets shot by a madman.
2. The left immediately assigns blame for the shooting on the Tea Party and Sarah Palin.
3. Fuller starts to talk about torturing and maiming the Tea Party and Sarah Palin.

Do I have PTSD? No, I have an undergrad psych degree, and studied related stuff in grad school. As a result, I have always kept up with stuff about motivation, memory, emotion, what part of the brain controls which stuff, etc.

I saw something a few weeks back, I forget where, about the correlation between adrenaline shots and strong memory.

The prevalent naive view is sort of that after a sudden, high-intensity traumatic event, you can quickly get back to normal by, I guess, exhaling and calming yourself. This doesn’t seem to be the case.

It seems important to focus on “sudden” and “high intensity.” Maybe you don’t get PTSD because your wife dies, but if she died in a car crash that you were in as well… .

Imagine your consciousness as something that’s being constantly recorded into your memory via a needle making a groove in an acetate 33 rpm vinyl record. The sudden high intensity event that releases adrenalin is like extra weight on the needle…it makes a bigger groove. Sometimes much bigger. Or maybe it’s a scratch across the grooves. The point is that there’s this lasting outsized effect on your ongoing consciousness.

You said
You’re not seriously going to argue there’s no causality here are you? Let’s review:

1. Fuller gets shot by a madman.

We agree here

2. The left immediately assigns blame for the shooting on the Tea Party and Sarah Palin.

I know the spin the Right is putting on it but I think it was more spin than reality. I think many people focused on the offensive crap spewed by Palin and said it wasn’t helpful I’m being quite honest when I say I didn’t here one person say Palin caused it. What I heard was that she sure doesn’t help. She is also on the side that thinks bringing guns to political rallies was a good idea. The Congresswoman even said she felt that she was over the top so… causing it no. Seems to be no link at all. But is she a net negative to the discussion as a whole absolutely. She can only stay relevant by bombast and fear.

3. Fuller starts to talk about torturing and maiming the Tea Party and Sarah Palin.

If he felt they created the climate and got shot, I’d go with Kranky He made the leap and it was unfortunate, regrettable, not right but IMO understandable that it could happen (not excusable) under the circumstances.

But liberals didn’t cause this and it isn’t a dominant theme that I have seen. Whining about the fire after putting down the gas cans though. What chutzpah.

I’m being quite honest when I say I didn’t here one person say Palin caused it.

Try this one on for size:

“Sarah Palin is the one that put Gabby Giffords in the gun’s crosshairs of this heinous assassin.”

That was from the Daily Kos. You could also check Krugman’s blog or The Nation, or Jane Fonda’s twitter page for more examples. Maybe they didn’t all make the accusation directly, but the cowardly innuendo, delivered with a wink and a nod, was plain to anyone. This blog’s own host jumped on the train and rode it all the way into abject humiliation when it was revealed that, not only was there no evidence the gunman was tied to Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, or any other conservative political organization, other evidence emerged that he was a “leftist” who was “quite liberal” and “hated Bush.”

So the fact remains that no matter how “provocative” or “not helpful” (or whatever mealymouthed label you choose) Sarah Palin’s or the Right’s “rhetoric” was leading up to this shooting, it was COMPLETELY unrelated to the shooting itself.

AND THEN, when some whack job on the left takes this garbage seriously, and starts to make seriously deranged comments about the above political targets, and actually threatens the life of one, it’s suddenly “unfortunate” and “regrettable” but ultimately “understandable”? Give me a freaking break.

And by the way, for all those who are now lamenting the “toxic” political environment – where in the hell were you for the eight years of the Bush administration? How soon we forget…

I agree 100% with Tilyosu here on both chains of reasoning. Plenty of figures on the left did explicitly blame the right for Loughner. Others chimed in with more oblique language after the initial claims were quickly shown to be baseless.

And there’s really no substantial flaw in the chain of reasoning about Fuller. I do think the initial provocation should be regarded as a substantial mitigating circumstance. But there’s plenty of reason to believe that the violent threats he made flowed directly from the pool of angry anti-right-wing rhetoric he bathed in.

I’m not, at this point, very interested in making any sort of a big deal about that. Any strong political partisan who thought he had been shot by someone inspired by enemy partisans is likely to go postal. It doesn’t IMO demonstrate that one side is worse, Instead, it demonstrates that a regular diet of anger is bad fuel.

I consider it a mitigating circumstance primarily because of the likelihood of PTSD or something like it. Bear in mind, mitigating circumstances do not indicate that a defendant ought to be found not guilty. They indicate that additional consideration should be given before determining punishment.

Fuller was shot and later made threats that he was, thankfully for all, stopped from carrying out. If the law decides he needs to be held accountable for that with some sort of official finding, I don’t dispute that. If the punishment is probation and counseling, that makes sense to me.

And by the way, for all those who are now lamenting the “toxic” political environment – where in the hell were you for the eight years of the Bush administration? How soon we forget…

This seems mightily presumptuous. And should “all” of us respond as a group or individually? Who is “we” and what makes you think “we” forgot something (soon, even)? (I personally spent a lot of time at the Centrist Coalition with KK when he went by another name, where we complained about the toxic political environment during the Bush years, if you must know.)

(I personally spent a lot of time at the Centrist Coalition with KK when he went by another name, where we complained about the toxic political environment during the Bush years, if you must know.)

Well, if that’s the case then I exclude you from that group. I was just making the point generally. It seems there’s been an awful lot of hand wringing in the MSM and blogosphere lately and it seems like a lot of people either have short memories or double standards.

And there’s really no substantial flaw in the chain of reasoning about Fuller. I do think the initial provocation should be regarded as a substantial mitigating circumstance. But there’s plenty of reason to believe that the violent threats he made flowed directly from the pool of angry anti-right-wing rhetoric he bathed in.

1. If short-term derangement from PTSD absolves Fuller, does Loughner get a pass on the basis of long-term derangement from whatever it turns out he has?

2. Would it make any difference if Fuller’s post-shooting comments were shown to be entirely consonant with his pre-shooting position? Tilly mentioned the Bush era, and that’s a good point, isn’t it? How long had Fuller “bathed in” the “pool of angry anti-right-wing rhetoric”? Long enough to marinate?

No Simon, when I said there’s no flaw in the chain of reasoning about Fuller, I meant Tilyosu’s casual chain of reasoning.

But who said anything about absolution? Not me. You’re a lawyer. You KNOW that absolution and mitigation are different.

I can’t speak to what Loughner “deserves” unless I know a lot more. I am an advocate of “guilty but insane,” not “not guilty by reason of insanity.” I can’t see any reason to let Loughner draw another free breath. But if he’s say schizophrenic, I hope they don’t simply convict him and toss him in jail. That would fit my definition of cruel and unusual, to takes a seriously mentally ill person and toss him in jail to spend the rest of his life like some sort of tortured animal.

@KK: “Do I have PTSD? No, I have an undergrad psych degree, and studied related stuff in grad school. As a result, I have always kept up with stuff about motivation, memory, emotion, what part of the brain controls which stuff, etc.

I saw something a few weeks back, I forget where, about the correlation between adrenaline shots and strong memory.

The prevalent naive view is sort of that after a sudden, high-intensity traumatic event, you can quickly get back to normal by, I guess, exhaling and calming yourself. This doesn’t seem to be the case.”

My wife has been in therapy for the last several years which deals with PTSD resulting from childhood trauma. I’m glad that your knowledge of it is based on education rather than experience. It’s truly heart-breaking.

From, what I know, it’s also sort of intransigent. Not something you cure, so much as something you manage. You find ways to avoid obvious triggers, and ways to self-soothe when you do get triggered.

My wife’s sister is in a similar boat as your wife, and she was pretty sick for a time. She is better now, but not cured in a meaningful sense. She has real anger and trust issues, as anyone can understand childhood abuse would cause. To the extent that she has found ways to manage it, this seems to me to be primarily an act of will.

She decided that she was tired of, for lack of a better term, marinating in the juices of her unfortunate past, an wasn’t going to let them rule her. The realization seemed to be that no matter who deserved the blame, it was going to be primarily up to her to craft viable solutions.

So she became a real lion, and is belligerent and hard to handle in some ways as a result of that. I am proud of her just the same.

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